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In Situ and Remote Water Monitoring in Central Asia—The Central Asian Water (CAWa) Network

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Current Trends in Landscape Research

Abstract

Water is an important natural resource as it plays a key role for living, agricultural production, and economic development. Central Asia features strongly heterogeneous landscapes in terms of orographic, climatic, and hydrologic conditions, which leads to a spatially non-uniform forming of water resources over the region. The availability and direct access to freshwater often result in disputes between the different countries. Therefore, a reliable trans-boundary water resource management is needed. Within the CAWa project, a network of automatic monitoring stations has been installed especially in remote areas and at higher altitudes providing continuously meteorological and hydrological parameters. In addition to the ground-based monitoring network, water levels and volume changes of selected lakes and reservoirs are provided by satellite-based radar altimetry. All data is stored in an open-access data base to support data sharing between the involved transnational agencies and thus, to allow sustainable decision-making about water management and to contribute to international scientific cooperation.

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Acknowledgements

The activities presented have been generously funded in the frame of the CAWa project (www.cawa-project.net) by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of the “German Water Initiative for Central Asia” (the so-called “Berlin Process,” grant AA7090002). Additional funding for the installation and long-term operation of the monitoring network was and is being provided by the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences in the frame of the Global Change Observatory Central Asia (GCO-CA) and the Helmholtz Association in the frame of the Helmholtz Roadmap program ACROSS.

We appreciate the support and fruitful cooperation with our colleagues from the national hydrometeorological Services of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan without whom, the site selections and station installations would not have been possible. In addition, we would like to thank the researchers of the University of Fribourg for the cooperation in installing optical camera systems for glacier monitoring at Abramov and Golubin glaciers. We extend our thanks to our colleagues at the Ulugh Beg Observatory (Uzbekistan) for the installation and maintenance of the Maidanak station. The installation of the CAWa station in Kabul (Afghanistan) would not have been possible without the excellent work of our colleagues at Kabul Polytechnic University. Also the support of the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC, http://www.afghanistan.no/) in Kabul is highly appreciated.

This chapter is the extended version of Schöne et al. (2018b).

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Correspondence to Tilo Schöne .

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Schöne, T. et al. (2019). In Situ and Remote Water Monitoring in Central Asia—The Central Asian Water (CAWa) Network. In: Mueller, L., Eulenstein, F. (eds) Current Trends in Landscape Research. Innovations in Landscape Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30069-2_27

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